How to Make EVA Foam Flowers Perfect for Crafts Props and Cosplay with Free Templates
Jan 11, 2021 15:01 · 1245 words · 6 minute read
welcome to the shop steve here at sks props and today i’m going to show you how to make some simple foam flowers for your craft and cosplay projects now i’ve made these flower templates available for you to download there is a smaller one and a larger one on there depending on your application or you can go into your pdf viewer and change the scale to whatever size you need to fabricate our flowers we’re going to be using a roll of two millimeter hd foam which is going to give us a good thickness to bulk them up but still be easy to manipulate you’ll notice a small dot in the middle of each flower template that’s actually a guide to use a straight pin to push through the two millimeter foam into the surface that’ll keep your flower template from moving around go ahead and cut out your templates and then transfer those directly onto the two millimeter hd foam using a ballpoint pen or pencil depending on the size of the flower you plan on creating i’d recommend to cut out two to three of each pattern after all your flower petals are cut out go ahead and transfer the leaf templates to the two millimeter foam and cut those out as well once we have our templates cut out we can start manipulating the flower petals and we’re going to do that using our heat gun now a heat gun can do some really cool things to foam you can lightly score it with a blade add some heat and the foam will open up which will give you some really cool intricate details now one thing to note is that you do not want to add too much heat or too close because you can burn or melt the foam you’ll notice especially on two millimeters that it takes heat very quickly and it will start to curl this is the perfect time for you to start manipulating the petals it will cool quickly so work fast and always remember when we’re applying heat to our foam we’re doing it in a well ventilated area and we’re always wearing our respirator now when it comes to heating the foam a trick that i like to do is to take a square of granite tape a piece of 10 millimeter hd foam to it and then using a straight pin secure my phone that i’m heating directly to the 10 millimeter foam that way when i’m using the heat gun it’s not blowing the thinner pieces all over the place go ahead and heat up your two millimeter hd foam and then use your hands to give all the pedals a slight curve after the petals have cooled go back with your blade and slice a little bit further down the score lines that we had previously made once all the flowers have been cut go ahead and apply more heat what this will do is start to separate the petals individually while retaining the curve from the initial heat treatment and you can now see how all the layers are going to go together to make a single flower to paint our flowers i’m going to be using utrecht brand heavy body brilliant blue and i’ll be applying the paint using a half inch flat brush this type of a paint is an opaque so it covers really well i don’t need to add any additional water to it to move it around because i want the highest pigment count possible once all the flower petals are painted i leave them to dry i want the flower petal edges to have an extra little bit of color so i’m going to break out my airbrush and use some createx iridescent red and of course you could apply any type of acrylic paints onto this by hand as well once all the flower petals have been airbrushed we’re going to use our sherbonne high temp hot glue gun to start assembling all the layers now the trick when assembling the layers is that i’m slightly rotating each one so the petals overlap also i’m not applying too much hot glue you want just enough for the layers to stick but not so much that when you push them together hot glue would squeeze out then it’s just repeating these steps again and again from the small petals to the large petals until you have your completed flower for our next flower design i’m actually going to be scoring these on the back side of the templates from the middle to the point of the petal all these petals are actually going to fold in on themselves somewhat like a rose go ahead and do the same heat treatment to these petals as we did for the first flower for this flower i’ll be using the utrecht brand cadmium free red medium i’m hot gluing a small half jewel into the first petal assembly because it’s still open a little bit at the top you could close this completely this is where having a detail tip on the sherbonne hot glue gun really comes in handy just like our first flower i’m assembling all the layers from small to large being sure to give them a random appearance now once all the pedals were fully assembled i went back with the heat gun and reheated some of the larger petals and bent them over to give it a more organic look and as a final highlight i’m going to use the createx pearlized airbrush paint your flowers could be done at this point but if you want you can go ahead and add the leaf patterns as well and i’m going to detail these by scoring them down the middle and then from the middle to the sides just like the petals we’re going to add some heat to these leaves and it’s going to allow the score marks to open up and give it some more detail to paint the leaves i’m going to once again go to the utrecht brand of acrylics this time using brilliant green the thing to note here is not only to get paint all over the surface but down into each one of the score lines that we’ve made just a little bit of high temp hot glue will keep these leaves in place because i had airbrushed the petals the leaves were looking a little too stark so i went back with some iridescent red and airbrushed the leaves there are all kinds of applications you could do with these foam flowers you could add them to your props or costumes make a crafty bouquet or simply just add a hair clip so you guys can see the steps it takes to put together my templates to create some basic foam flowers for your crafts and cosplay now again these are made out of my two millimeter hd foam that you can find over at blick art materials as well as a wide selection of other fine art products like the brushes and paints used in this video now if you guys are making any of these projects be sure to tag blick and myself online because we love seeing your progress hopefully you guys enjoy this video and learn something from it and until next time thanks for stopping by you.